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For anyone clamouring for a game that places you in the enviable shoes of a fast-food employee, you’re in luck. Nowadays you can almost see the blue fibres of a Mcdonald’s vest clinging to your university degree, hinting at things to come – but Sky Burger’s impression of a career in takeaway makes burger construction enjoyably compulsive.
Sky Burger is the improved but nearly identical twin of Scoops, with hamburger-stacking replacing the latter game’s ice cream mounds. The game relies on piling ingredients onto a bun as they fall from the sky, using either the tilt or touch-based control scheme to catch the right item. Each level represents a customer’s order, asking you to fill the burger with a particular set of ingredients that have to be included before you can sell it off to the punter.
Naturally orders become increasingly complex as your status increases in the commercially viable world of novelty-burger construction. The game is one-part career simulator, and after successful making enough burgers you’ll begin to move up in the professional ladder, being promoted with a new job title, and taking on orders that have a much more extensive recipe.
These aren’t necessarily more difficult as much as they are more extensive. In fact, most levels tend to require the same amount of effort regardless of how far along you are in the game: An order that asks for 28 onions and 30 beef patties doesn’t involve any different strategy to catching three tomatoes, but the longer you’re toiling in the burger mines, the more prone you’ll be to accidents.
And that’s exactly what you don’t want. This is a money-making business so the more successful you are at this the more money you amass in-game; similarly, the less you fill a burger with unwanted ingredients, the bigger the tip. Therein lies the desire to keep building. Somewhere between the in-game achievements and the personal goals you set for yourself is a game that is almost bizarrely difficult to stop playing.
Sky Burger levels – essentially bonus stages between standard orders where you create as high a stack as possible – are driven by achievement incentives to make a burger that reaches the Moon. But additional motivators are less predetermined: The backdrop alone helps to carry the game, wit skyscrapers that litter the background encouraging you to build something that rivals their height. Even once you reach the Moon, basic curiosity over what lies beyond carries the rest.
It’s a shame the difficulty ramp is essentially non-existent, but Sky Burger is still surprisingly challenging even in its vanilla state. If only the reality of being a career burger stacker was that fun.
